Free Tools for Crafting Better Blog Posts

Need help crafting blog posts? There are several free tools available to help you create better blog posts.

Having a blog offers numerous benefits, from increased traffic and exposure to higher search rankings and more sales. But a blog is only effective if users are interested in reading it. This is why it’s essential that bloggers publish high-quality, engaging content that’s relevant to their respective audience.

Thankfully, there are several free tools available that can help streamline the process of crafting better blog posts.

Tools for Doing Research:

Hubspot Blog Topic Generator

While not perfect by any means, the Hubspot Blog Topic Generator is an excellent tool for uncovering new topic ideas. Enter between 1 and 3 relevant nouns, and it will reveal several topic ideas surrounding those nouns. You may have to tweak the wording on some of these suggestions, but it’s still a great way to brainstorm new ideas for your blog.

Google recently added a helpful little tool to Drive that allows you to conduct Google searches without ever leaving your Drive window. All you have to do is click “Tools” from the menu bar and choose “Research” from the dropdown menu.

Tools for Doing Your Writing:

Lazarus Form Recovery

Granted, Lazarus Form Recovery isn’t going to improve the quality your blog post per-se, but it can certainly help to avoid disaster in the event of Internet and/or server outages. This free web browser add-on lives up to its namesake by recovering lost data from online forms and fields, including blog post forms. When your Internet goes, normally you’ll lose all of your work if you click the “publish” button. But with Lazarus, all data is saved periodically to your browser, preventing this type of disaster from occurring.

Word 2 Clean HTML

What in the world is Word 2 Clean HTML? It’s exactly what it sounds like: a tool that’s used to clean up formatting elements from Microsoft Word text so it can pasted into a web-based form or content management system like WordPress. When you copy and paste text from Word to WordPress (or any CMS platform), it often transfers formatting options that can disturb the HTML. With Word 2 Clean HTML, it prevents these options from transferring to ensure a clean and concise post.

Word Counter

We all know the importance of writing rich blog posts consisting of X amount of words. For some bloggers, the ideal length is 200 words. For others, it’s 500 or even 1,000 words. Rather than counting each and every word to ensure you reach this amount, you can use the web-based tool Word Counter to do it for you. Just copy and paste your blog post into Word Counter, and it will reveal exactly how many words it contains. Alternatively, you can use Microsoft Word, as it too has a built-in word counting feature.

Tools for Adding Creative:

If you ever find yourself short on images and graphics then you’ll love Canva. Canvaoffers a huge library of pre-made templates and assets that you can manipulate while also adding your own imagery, The graphic below tool less than 2 minutes.

This is one of my personal favorite sources for free photos in a pinch. All images and videos on Pixabay are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0. You may download, modify, distribute, and use them royalty-free for anything you like, even in commercial applications. Attribution is not required.

There are a ton of great resources online to help you craft better blog posts, but these are definitely some of my favorites that get used all the time and hopefully you will find them helpful too.

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Author: Pixel is the art director for Pixel Productions Inc., a strategic graphic and web design company where his focus is to continually find creative and innovative strategies to implement with businesses who need brand design and marketing with impact.